Sunday, January 07, 2007

Saturday Evening - No Honky Tonkying

Yesterday evening we all went to Longhorn’s for my sister Bonnie's birthday dinner. Longhorn’s is a nice fairly decent place to cater to people’s eating eccentricities; to swap this for that or leave off something that comes with it and instead add so and so. The waiter, knowing his tip depends just how he juggles things between the kitchen and us agrees readily. At the end, when Anna and I were grading our service and calculating the tip Adam said, “Should I call Rocky?” We usually leave these calculations up to Rocky and he can usually come up with a fair-for-everyone figure.

Rocky wasn’t there. At that moment Rocky was just landing from his week in Ireland. He had to spend much too long at the Atlanta Internationally Airport Customs…. When you come in from an international flight you have to pick up your baggage, then go to another section and return your baggage for customs… it seemed like a complicated and time consuming process. We talked to him later that night and he was very tired, but also eager to tell what he saw and did.

After Bonnie’s birthday dinner we took my mother-in-law home. Earlier she told us that a family was using the back of her property for a garbage dump. She has a sizable piece of property and more than half of it is woods. The wooded property goes up a ridge and on top of the ridge are a few houses perched there. I think they have small yards. Behind their houses is an old road bed with looks something like a gully going down a hill. That is the dumping grounds. A man that lives in one of the houses called Marie and told her what his neighbors were doing. I walked up to look for myself. Sure enough, the gully-like grown-up road had about three wheelbarrow loads of garbage. I think they just started this so it is bound to get worse. I think the man said the dumpers are Asian. Now what?

I was thinking of carrying rubber gloves up there with me and shift through the garbage and if I can find an address on some junk mail or something then I would have proof who it belonged to, I could approach them and tell them to quit… or maybe, just throw it back onto their property in their back yard.

It was getting dark and instead of walking a long way back via the streets and roads I cut through the woods. There were a lot of holes, bushes, limbs, and whatever I kept having to deal with in the dust time. The scenery and my footsteps reminded me of the “Blair Witch Project” which isn’t the thing to think about while you are tromping in the woods make "tromping-in-leaves-sounds" alone in the dark. Then, I thought, all these woods would be a good dumping place for a dead body. That didn’t help either… although it did help my speed to get the heck out of there.